Kenya will start teaching Chinese to elementary school students from 2020

So for me personally Mandarin was like a dream come true because there's barely any grammar at all. I just have to speak the words in the correct order "you want with me eat food?" "you eat finished?" "tomorrow we together go climb mountain?".

relatively speaking. There's grammar of course and it's interesting and subtle, but it's much less than romance languages and there are basically no exceptions. The closest thing to the exception I can think of is the "ill-thought out sentence" （没想好的句子）, which is an exception to word order where you forget to say the beginning of the sentence and instead put it at the end: "go see movie? ...you tomorrow"

This says little about the overall state, one should examine more years, also I am comparing 2018 to 2017 but I am too lazy.

Bearish on Africa

Do you have any citations to support this? From the research I have read (and my own anecdotal experience) this is not necessarily the case, especially when taking into account the bilingual speakers' dominant language.

See e.g.

Pearson et al. (1993). Lexical Development in Bilingual Infants and Toddlers: Comparison to Monolingual Norms.

Allman (2005). Vocabulary Size and Accuracy of Monolingual and Bilingual Preschool Children. – although note the difference in English vs Spanish vocabulary scores for monolingual vs bilingual speakers.

In the US, it required regulations and the creation of institutions like the FDA. These will remain sufficient to prevent further abuse hinges on the combination of regulatory institutions and the press (who reports grievous abuse when regulators allow grievous abuse, given regulatory capture is a constant threat). China's press and public institutions seem to be getting weaker and weaker. Thus things may or may not get better.

The key phrase here is used to.

Because things were bad in the United States over 100 years ago (The Jungle was published in 1904), doesn't mean that today's adulterated Chinese food is somehow magically OK.

To be fair, that has been pretty much the world bank playbook for decades. I dont see why an exploitation in that form would revert back to more classic forms of colonialism. Upholding a colonial regime is simply not worth the effort if you have similar financial benefits with loans with horrible conditions.

Which country has taken over another "slowly and peacefully"?

It's hyperbole at best to claim that kenya offering chinese as "an elective" ( not mandatory ) to its student is an "invasion". My high school offered spanish, french and japanese as language electives. Last I checked, we weren't invaded and conquered by spain, france or japan.

I've read that children in Hong Kong now have to learn Mandarin in school instead of Cantonese. So using language as influence isn't foreign to the Chinese state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

For spoken Mandarin, you can probably infer enough from the conversational context, but for official documents, business and technical terminology, or any literature, full romanization renders the text much less incomprehensible.

This isn't helped by the fact that Classical Chinese, from which most complex vocabulary is derived, is even more homophonic than daily speech.

Remember, literacy was a rare and elite thing throughout the Western world as well, until the 19th century started seeing the first attempts at universal education. Widespread literacy is a 20th century thing. And China lagged behind the West, having spent the first half of the 20th century throwing off colonial oppression rather than developing a sophisticated, modern education system. So until recently, it cost China nothing to use pictograms rather than romanization. So no, not "deliberately hard".

Since then, China built a modern education system, and has literacy rates on par with western nations. So it's not preventing China from teaching children to read. Therefore, your claim that "teaching it to children has been shown to slow their learning" constitutes an extraordinary claim, and requires some extraordinary evidence.

Occam's Razor suggests that you think it's hard because it's unfamiliar, not because it's hard.

Is there also a conspiracy by the Danish "elites" to deliberately keep the language's phonological complexity so there's a "higher barrier of entry" to become an "intellectual"?

Without using profanities, I'd just say that summary is absolute NONSENSE.

Pinyin is still taught in schools today starting from preschool. Most of the current generation of Chinese people are familiar with both and the common sentiment is that truly phonetic writing systems aren't practical, and that CCP attempts to use Pinyin as a "real" writing system were misguided and yet another example of the government trying to destroy Chinese culture.

Things like "ough" for /a:f/, and vowel shifts whereby /a/ gets written "u".

Compared to that, some languages have sane Latinization.

Since English is so pervasive, people round the world can look at it and feel good about their own Latinization.

The Latin alphabet is the most popular phonetic alphabet, and keyboards (and formerly typewriters) for it are widely available. Not so for many of the others.

I can see that being a major motivation for Latinization, especially for smaller languages.

Modern Standard Mandarin has way fewer syllables than Middle Chinese and Southern Chinese languages which makes homophones a lore more common. Vietnamese didn't really have this problem because the phonology is a lot more complex and it shows through the written word.

An example of homophones creating ambiguity: An Jung-geun was a Korean independence activist who assassinated a former Japanese Prime Minister in 1909. He is often called 義士 in Korean textbooks which means "hero, man of honor". However, 義士(의사) is pronounced in the same way as 醫師(의사) which means "doctor". The Hangul spelling is identical thus it has led to many younger Koreans to think An Jung-geun was a doctor and question why would a doctor intentionally kill someone. It's more of a tongue-in-cheek joke but it shows the problem of completely detaching a writing system from a language that does not sufficiently distinguish words without context. In Chinese this is not a problem because by people usually learn this type of stuff on paper first. The additional context helps reduce the ambiguity in spoken conversation. Being able to talk to each other without writing is not sufficient proof that a writing system can be abolished with minimal impact, because it ignores the fact that the writing system is what helped to dispel the ambiguity in the first place.

Also I can imagine that adding a new language choice is very expensive.

Anyway, sure, here's a source I found quickly which actually makes stronger claims than I did: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/at-what-age-does-...

Interesting of you to make that claim as english spelling is usually a nightmare to learn (as is French spelling to a minor extent). Sometimes people really are learning it word by word. It seems easier for you because you're already familiar with it.

> And the payoff is much higher: learning Chinese only lets you communicate with Chinese/Taiwanese people. Learning English lets you communicate with a huge proportion of the world who also learns English as a second language, simply because it's the current lingua franca.

Well, seeing as there are well over a billion of chinese people I'd think twice about using the word "only". Also there are many who speak it as a second language as well.

except you are memorizing thousands and thousands of spellings to learn English

You also need smaller vocabulary in Chinese - 3500 characters is all you need. English vocabulary is absolutely massive.

The grammar is pretty bizarre as well, as far as I am able to judge.

ha, i see that in the english captioning sometimes when watching chinese dramas. at least gender is only in the pronouns, rather than (nearly) every word via gender suffixes (like the romance languages).

Chinese numbers quite logical and straightforward, true, though French (and German etc.) numbers pose small hurdles only, I'd say.

> Chinese is considerably easier and English considerably harder if your first language is an Asian language.

That really depends which language you're talking about. I'd bet most Indonesians, for example, would disagree. However, granted, a language will be easier when you are familiar with a language that has many cognates.

In China we effectively have a CEO in Xi Jinping, beholden to the board of investors that is the global economy. And the same forces are at play. China can punt on ethics so long as the return is good, and they have pressure to keep growing. So long as the banks are happy the game continues.

The global investment-backed economy is efficient for allocating resources for the purposes of increasing monetary value but it will always introduce a moral hazard since short term returns will usually be better when corners are cut.

Soviets ended up controlling East Germany, but the didn't capitalize on that. US did much better with the culturally identical West Germany. This isn't exactly Socialism / Capitalism battle we have here, but if China ends up controlling most corrupt states while the West ends up with the least corrupt states the long-term outcome might be similar.

Montenegro is on the same boat[0]. Serbian autocratic regime seem to get along with China's regime pretty well. Bosnia became the most western visa-free country for Chinese citizens last year.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-silkroad-europe-mon...

In sub-saharan Africa, different places will have different languages that are important to economic success. For instance, if you're Senegalese, you're far better off perfecting your French than learning Chinese or English. That's just the raw, ugly, and unfortunate economic reality in which impoverished children in Senegal live. So the government has set things up so that children can get a small chance at making themselves impressive to Francophone companies. Because a slim chance, is better than no chance. Obviously those mandatory french classes come at the expense of English, but who cares? These kids need jobs.

Now in more and more parts of Africa for young people there is what is essentially a chance at a lottery ticket going around out there. An education visa to China. And the way they work, most business done with Africa will flow through you if you get one of those visas. If they perfect their English, the same is not true. The business that America does with Africa will not start flowing through you just because you speak English well. (And that's even ignoring the fact that America doesn't do business with Africa the same way China does.) So, yes, impoverished kids who are smart, ambitious, and tired of being hungry are going to work their rear ends off trying to get one of those visas. You or I would do the same. And good on them. They're out trying to make a way for themselves in life. That's to be commended.

It sounds like the Kenyans simply see what is becoming common knowledge in sub-saharan Africa. China is a ticket out of poverty for a lot of their more bright kids who may not be as privileged as people in the rest of the world. It's easy for us to say, "Hey, that Chinese is a bad thing." But what's the kid supposed to do with our idealism? Sure it can be a bad thing, so is diamond mining, but it pays, and for poor people in Africa these days, not many things do.

The salient point is that people here have rose tinted glasses when it comes to the negative effects of American military actions since the Spanish–American War. For the vast majority of the world, America, China, two sides of the same coin. Just another foreign government telling them what to do and taking things from them under the veneer of helping them.

The articles on Kenya's debt situation were very enlightening, thank you! It looks offhand like it's problematic, but not unsolvable. See where things are in another ten years. But a debt crisis isn't any better for lenders than it is for debtors. What good does it do China for Kenya to default on its loans?

As for 5% growth... that's really good. Maybe not the best in Africa, but far better than the mature economies of the West (most of Europe has hovered around 1% for the same period, and the US is 1.4%). That makes for an attractive investment opportunity, especially by non-state actors who are even less interested in defaulted loans than nations are.

As for China's interest... well, their manufacturing-based economy needs a steady supply of raw materials. Africa has those. And China is not interested in military occupation to enforce resource extraction, colonial style. That leaves trade, and trade has to be mutually beneficial over the long term, or one party will just stop participating.

(edit: As an aside, it's absurd and annoying that your comment is getting downvoted. I really wish people would stop using downvoting as a "disagree" button, especially for things they don't understand.)